T-Mobile resumes Sidekick sales after outage

Updated 11:52 a.m.: Microsoft says it is still working on restoring Sidekick data and services. An Oct. 17 status update is still the company’s most recent statement.

Michelle Webb, a T-Mobile spokeswoman, said data recovery is close to complete.

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T-Mobile announced late Monday that it has resumed sales of Sidekick smartphones after a Microsoft server outage caused millions of customers to lose their personal data.

T-Mobile halted Sidekick sales in early October. After a month-long hiatus, the smartphone is back on the market at reduced prices: $150 for the Sidekick LX 2009 (down from about $180) and $50 for the Sidekick 2008 (down from about $100), with a two-year contract, T-Mobile said.

Sometime during the weekend of Oct. 3, a server outage at Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which developed the smartphone, shut down Sidekick data service. Soon, Microsoft and T-Mobile said the back-up servers also were affected, and on Oct. 10 T-Mobile said many customers’ data “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”

The Sidekick data service is unlike most others. Instead of storing data locally, Sidekicks hold caches of data and rely on Microsoft’s servers for permanent storage. When those servers failed, Sidekick owners who reset their devices lost that cache of data.

The debacle raised serious concerns over the reliability of Microsoft’s cloud-computing offerings, such as Windows Azure. But Microsoft has said Azure is built on different technology; Microsoft inherited Danger’s Sidekick infrastructure when it acquired the company in 2008.